He stopped playing when Moonshine suddenly lifted her head up off her paws, and a moment later he heard the door of his trailer creak open. He set the guitar back in its case and watched Rachel come out, silhouetted for a couple of seconds against the light inside before she made her way down the steps, holding on to the wooden railing with both hands. He got up and went to get her, meaning to help her to the chair, but she shook her head and seated herself gingerly on the next-to-bottom step.

“You didn’t have to stop playing. I just wanted to give you this.” She held it out to him-the envelope he’d last seen when he’d copied her name and address off the front, the one she’d had taped to her belly, that he’d removed from her yesterday morning along with her clothes.

He gave a little snort of surprise as he took it from her. “Where’d you have it stashed this time?”

He could barely make out her hint of a smile. “Not on me-I don’t think it would stick. Right now my stomach’s pretty much like a big bowl of pudding. I had it under the cushion in the baby carrier.”

“Well, it must be pretty important,” J.J. drawled. Considering the trouble you’ve gone through to keep it hidden-and safe.

She nodded, and when she spoke, she sounded tense. “It-that letter-is what made me think I could finally get away from Carlos. That’s where I was planning to go.”

He held the envelope, weighing it in his hand. “So…why are you giving it to me now? Does this mean you’ve decided to trust me? A little?”

Again she had her arms wrapped around herself, huddled on that hard wooden step, and her face was turned away and in shadows. Her voice sounded whispery and exhausted. “Please understand…it’s been very hard for me to know who to trust. But-” she exhaled audibly “-as you said, I guess if you’d wanted to kill me and take my baby back to Carlos, it would have been very easy for you to do that. Instead, as you pointed out, I have you-and your dog-to thank for saving our lives. So, since I can’t do this by myself and am going to have to trust someone, it might as well be you.”

“A ringing endorsement if I ever heard one,” J.J. said dryly. He opened the envelope and took out several sheets of paper, some of it heavy and obviously expensive. “You gonna tell me what this is, or let me figure it out for myself?”

“It’s a letter,” she said, in a voice that was suddenly completely devoid of expression. “From my grandfather, Sam Malone.”

“Sam Malone?” He glanced up at her and grinned. “Not the Sam Malone, I suppose?”

She stared blankly back at him. “I didn’t even know there was a the Sam Malone.”

“Come on. Reclusive multibillionaire, struck it rich out here on the desert somewhere during the Great Depression, made a fortune during World War II, hung out with the rich and the famous before he dropped out of sight sometime in the sixties. Not as notorious-or as crazy-as Howard Hughes, but in the same general category. Don’t tell me you never heard of him. My God, I didn’t know he was still alive.”

She shook her head in a bewildered kind of way and said faintly, “I don’t know if he is.”

He stood up and clicked on a switch in a cord dangling down alongside the front door, turning on a string of Christmas lights that looped across the front of the trailer. “From what I recall,” he said as he sat back down in the folding chair, “the guy was quite a character. Worked as a stuntman in old Hollywood for a while-knew all the big stars. I think he married a starlet, or maybe it was a folksinger…” He lost the train of what he was saying right about then, because he was studying the letter.

The first page was a cover letter from an attorney, and he skimmed it quickly before he set it in his lap and moved on to the next one. This was a handwritten letter, written on lined paper torn from a cheap notebook, the kind J.J. remembered writing school reports on when he was a kid, in the days before his folks had been able to afford a computer. The writing was old-fashioned and hard to read, but underneath that, on more of the lawyer’s expensive paper, was what appeared to be a typed version. He pulled that out and began to read.

My name is Sam Malone, though for some reason some have preferred to call me by the nickname, Sierra, and I happen to be your grandfather. I am a very old man now, and I’ve lived a full and interesting life, during which I managed to amass a considerable fortune and squander the love of three beautiful women. As a result, I was not privileged to know my own children, a fact that I deeply regret. But this is not the time for regrets, and I can’t do much to change the past anyhow.

Since I have outlived all of my wives and my children, it is my desire to share my treasure with my grandchildren, any that may chance to survive me, and it is this last wish that has led me to write this letter to you. If you are not too dead-set against me and would care to come to my ranch to collect your inheritance, I do not believe you would be sorry.

I have enclosed a little map, in case you should decide to take me up on my offer. And I’m sure my lawyer will add some instructions as to how to get in touch with my staff, to let them know…

“Wow.”

J.J. looked up, hands full of the pages of the letter, and stared at the small form huddled in the pool of light on his front steps. “Good Lord, woman, do you even know what this means? Do you have any idea what kind of resources you have?”

She lifted her head and gazed back at him, her eyes only dark shadows. “You say he was a movie stuntman in old Hollywood…I guess that would explain why my grandmother liked to watch old Western movies, wouldn’t it? He was probably in some of them.” Her laugh had a liquid sound. “He might even have known him-the Duke. Don’t you think?”

J.J. was trying to get his head around the fact that he’d not only delivered the grandson of notorious crime family boss Carlos Delacorte, but also the great-grandson of Sierra Sam Malone, one of the true legends of the twentieth century.

“Wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” he said.


Rachel gazed out the windows of the anonymous late-model white pickup truck at the desert landscape sweeping by, watching constantly changing vistas-scrubby trees and shrubs she didn’t know the names of set on a carpet of golden flowers, juniper and Joshua tree-covered hills, and beyond them mountains layered in shades of purple and blue, canyons with cliffs carved in fantastic shapes and striated in red, orange, pink and cream, plains strewn with black lava rock from eruptions so ancient their sources had long since eroded away. Evidences of human habitation were few and far between, and often in advanced stages of abandonment and decay. Like those long-gone volcanoes, she thought, they’d been unable to stand up to the ravages of heat and sun and the unrelenting wind.

She was sure some people-Sheriff Jethro Fox for one-would find the desert harsh and barren and soulless, but to Rachel the vast emptiness, the endless vistas and boundless sky spoke of freedom. She hadn’t truly understood until hers was taken from her how precious a thing freedom was. Freedom to come and go, freedom to speak and laugh and visit, and most especially, freedom from fear. She wasn’t free in that sense, not yet, but the desert, the openness and emptiness, made her heart lift, made her believe such a thing might be possible for her, after all.

She thought then of what it had taken to bring her to this point, where freedom and a future without fear seemed within her grasp. She thought of the unlikely people who had made her escape possible: the mysterious Sam Malone, her grandfather, whom she had resented and despised as long as she could remember for his abandonment of her grandmother, and the letter holding the promise of a means to create a new life for herself, someplace where Carlos couldn’t find her.

Then there was…this man. Sheriff J. J. Fox, the lawman who might have stepped right out of one of the old cowboy movies she and Grandmother had loved to watch. The lawman who had not only saved her life and her baby’s life, too, but had given her shelter and protection, and now was taking her in his own private pickup truck to find her grandfather’s hideaway.

Her stomach clenched when she thought of him, sitting across the truck’s center console from her, not even an arm’s length away. It had been a long time since she’d been this close to an attractive man, so close she could almost hear his vital signs humming, smell his aftershave. And she had to smile inwardly at that thought, remembering awakening that morning to the sound of him swearing in the bathroom next to the tiny bedroom in which she’d slept, and then finding him later in the kitchenette, clean-shaven, with his jaws scrubbed rosy and dotted with bits of blood-speckled toilet paper.

Then…she thought of the way she’d trusted him, and fear clenched cold in her belly. Did she trust him, really? Was he being a little too nice? Sure, he’d said it was his job to rescue and protect her, but hadn’t his job ended when he’d delivered her safely to the hospital? Did his job really include taking her and her newborn son into his home, taking her shopping, buying her clothes, personal stuff-a toothbrush?

What does he want?

It swept over her again-the fear and suspicion and uncertainty. It came back to her like a movie scene on replay, recalling Izzy in her habit, telling her not to trust anyone.

Then it hit her.

Izzy! Oh, God, I forgot about Izzy. What if Carlos-how could I be so selfish? What have I done?

“Rachel? Rachel.”

The sharp edges of J.J.’s voice woke the big old dog sleeping beside the baby carrier in the backseat, and penetrated the fog of fear inside her head. She turned her head away from the window and caught the glance of concern he threw at her, realizing only then that her hands were curled into fists and pressed against her cheeks.

“You were a million miles away,” he said, and the side of his mouth she could see was tilted in a John Wayne lopsided smile. He glanced up at his rearview mirror and said, “It’s okay, Moon-go back to sleep.” Then he looked at her again, and the smile vanished. “What’s wrong?”

She opened her mouth, then shook her head and looked out the window again, seeing nothing but a blur this time. How could I have forgotten Izzy? My dearest friend, and I just left her there. If anything has happened to her…

“Rachel.” His voice was quiet but insistent. “What’s wrong? Tell me. If it’s something to do with Carlos-”

She shook her head rapidly, as if that would dislodge the awful images that wanted to invade there. Flashes of Carlos’s face, suffused with rage, his hand raised, his fist coming at her. Her head exploding with shock and pain. She drew a shuddering breath. “It’s…my friend. The one I told you I borrowed the habit from. She insisted I go-I didn’t want to leave her there. I didn’t. She said Carlos wouldn’t harm a nun, but I don’t know. I don’t think there’s anything Carlos wouldn’t do. If he’s hurt her-”

“Whoa, wait, slow down.” The pickup lurched and Moonshine sat up as he pulled off onto the wide sandy shoulder and stopped. He threw the lever, putting the truck in neutral, then turned in his seat and reached for her. She felt his hands on her arms, her shoulders, holding her firmly but not hard. This time, she held herself rigid and didn’t give in to the desire to take refuge in the harbor he offered. Because what she really longed to do was lean forward and lay her head against his chest and have his arms come around her, because something beyond all reason was telling her he had the power to make everything right again. She didn’t deserve that. She didn’t have the right to feel safe, not with Izzy-

“Come on, now, take it easy, okay? Just take a deep breath, calm down and tell me what happened.”

She nodded and dropped her eyes, avoiding that steely green gaze and fastening hers instead on a tiny nick on his cheek where he’d cut himself shaving. Staring at that spot, that small vulnerability, she felt a kind of peace come over her, along with a strange urge to touch the cut place. She couldn’t recall ever having that kind of impulse with Nicholas. Nicky had guarded his personal privacy religiously. She’d never have dared to invade his personal space unless he invited her to.

She shook off the distraction along with the dangerous impulse to trust this man she barely knew. Allowing herself to become so dependent on a man just because he’d saved her life once and was inexplicably helping her now was just foolhardy. This was real life, not one of her grandmother’s old cowboy movies, and you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys by the color of their hats. The fact that J. J. Fox reminded her of John Wayne didn’t automatically make him a good guy.